“and how is more people reading or stepping outside their comfort level to read in any way a bad thing?” I have no problem with asking readers to step outside their comfort zones, and I ask this of them regularly. But if readers are being asked to step outside their comfort zones, they should know this before they whip out their Visa cards, not after.

“Memoirs that turn out to be untrue are never deceptive on the part of the publisher” Neither you nor anyone else can know this for a fact. Some recent memoirs raise a lot of questions about what publishers knew and when they knew it. Sarah Crichton at Farrar, Straus, for example, has consistently refused to say how she checked the facts in A Long Way Gone and has very tightly controlled the questions the media have been allowed to ask Ishmael Beah about the book that he calls a “memoir.” And I’m not convinced that readers know all they should about that book.